Pune: Industrialist Gautam Adani on Sunday said that AI (artificial intelligence) is no longer just a technology race, it is a contest for global domination, adding, “If Bharat does not build its own AI models and its own compute infrastructure and its own intelligence ecosystem, then our behaviours, preferences, markets and decisions will be extracted, trained upon and monetised by other nations.“He was speaking at the inauguration of Vidya Pratishthan’s Sharadchandra Pawar Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence in Baramati where NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar, Baramati MP Supriya Sule, deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar, his wife and Rajya Sabha MP Sunetra Pawar were present. Adani added, “Bharat must approach AI not as a convenience, but as a strategic national capability built in Bharat, governed in Bharat, and aligned with Bharat’s national interest.“The industrialist said that human progress does not move in a straight line, it advances in leaps, each leap propelled by a technology revolution that first unsettles society and then rebuilds it at a far higher level of capability. Today, we are living through the fourth industrial revolution—an age defined by artificial intelligence, he added. He said that history teaches us that every such transition carries two opposing forces—extraordinary opportunity and profound anxieties. Fear of displacement, fear of irrelevance and fear of giving up control to systems we do not yet fully understand are not signs of weakness, they are deeply human. “However, history is remarkably consistent on the fact that technology does not destroy work, it first disrupts roles and then expands possibilities,” Adani said.The cellphone revolution, much as everyone had feared, did not destroy jobs. It multiplied them on a massive scale. Between 1991 and 2024, the country added over 230 million non-farm jobs, the majority created after the spread of digital infrastructure, he said.“I can confidently say that artificial intelligence will now represent the next and far more powerful leap. If cellphones gave Bharat greater access, AI will give it greater capability,” he said.Adani said every great technology leap is also a double-edged knife. “Growth without sovereignty creates dependence. While job creation is vital, a nation of 1.4 billion people cannot afford to place its jobs, data, culture, and collective intelligence at the mercy of foreign algorithms and foreign balance sheets,” he added.He added that real transformation begins when AI models step into the real world, into airports, ports, power grids, and factories. “This is where the value of AI truly explodes. I call this the industrialization of AI,” he said.
